Episode 5: Jane Baldwin

Jane Baldwin has just completed her first year as an Assistant Professor at the University of California Irvine. Her combination of interests is non-traditional, at least for someone coming up through the places and programs that she has. For one thing, Jane does straight up climate dynamics. One of her recent projects, for example, is about how mountains affect various aspects of the tropical climate. But Jane also has a strong interest in how climate affects people, and that leads her in some diverse and interdisciplinary directions. One thread of her research involves extreme heat events, and in that work she’s collaborating with experts in public health to understand the human impacts of those events. In another thread, one that she started during a postdoc in Adam’s group at Columbia University, Jane is looking at tropical cyclone risk. In particular, she is trying to translate tropical cyclone hazard, which means the probabilities of storms with given intensities, into the actual damage those storms would cause. Quantifying climate impacts like this is messy work. It isn’t based on any fundamental physical equations such as those describing the atmosphere or oceans. Often the kind of data or knowledge that would be important to have does not exist. To produce good studies of climate impacts, one needs to collaborate widely, and one needs to know the user and understand what they’re going to do with the results. But this is what it takes to bring knowledge to action, and Jane is serious about doing that. “I had a great time during my PhD, but I think something that weighed on me a little bit is that I felt like there was a bit of a hierarchy in that program […] The people who do theoretical atmosphere dynamics, that’s the peak of the pyramid, […] and if you’re really smart, that’s what you should be doing […]. I think I’m still kind of coming to terms with who I am as a scientist and being like, yeah, maybe that’s not my jam, but the stuff I’m doing is really cool, and I think as intellectually engaging just in different, maybe slightly different ways.” Precisely because this work is so collaborative, interdisciplinary, and focused on objectives that are not purely academic, it’s not entirely obvious that universities know how to reward it. Adam and Jane talk for a while at the end about the potential risks a young academic might be taking by going in this direction. Before Jane became an academic, she had already gathered work experience in a completely different industry, when she interrupted her college education to work for a year as a fashion model. She talks with Adam about what that was like, what she learned during that year, why she did it in the first place and why she later decided to go back to school and become a scientist. The interview with Jane Baldwin was recorded in December 2021. Image credit: Jane Baldwin Jane’s website at the University of California Irvine on Twitter: @janebaldwin